Books & Papers
What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters
A short guide to living well by understanding better what you really value—and what to do when your goals conflict
January 2023
August 2023 - The Washington Post - Opinion by Valerie Tiberius
Second Edition, Routledge 2023
Released in 2014, this was the first philosophy textbook in moral psychology, introducing students to a range of philosophical topics and debates such as: what is moral motivation? Do reasons for action always depend on desires? Is emotion or reason at the heart of moral judgment? Under what conditions are people morally responsible? Are there self-interested reasons for people to be moral?
The Second Edition of Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction, updates its responses to these questions, taking advantage of the explosion of recent research from philosophers and psychologists on these topics, and adding a chapter on the question of whether morality is innate or learned. As before, the book emphasizes the relationship between traditional and interdisciplinary approaches to moral psychology and aims to carefully explain how empirical research is (or is not) relevant to philosophical inquiry. The bulleted summaries, study questions, and lists for further readings at the end of each chapter have been updated.
Key Updates to the Second Edition:
Includes a new opening section on human nature, borrowing material from elsewhere in the book
Adds a new chapter on evolutionary and developmental arguments for the innateness of morality
Expands coverage of the challenges to psychological research, including the replication crisis and the WEIRDness challenge
Provides a new section on implicit bias and moral responsibility
Offers enhanced clarity and accessibility throughout
Includes up-to-date further reading sections and bibliography
"This might be the only textbook I’ve read that I can honestly describe as a page-turner. Engaging and funny, this fantastic book manages to cover the vast field of moral psychology, from ancient philosophical theories to the latest empirical findings. Tiberius is able to illustrate and explain complex philosophical puzzles in a way that is not only clear – it’s also clearly applicable to readers’ own lives."
Jesse Graham, The University of Utah
BOOKS
Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well
Oxford University Press 2018
What is human well-being? Valerie Tiberius argues that our lives go well to the extent that we succeed in terms of what matters to us emotionally, reflectively, and over the long term. In other words, well-being consists in fulfilling or realizing our appropriate values over time. In the first half of the book, Tiberius sets out the theory of well-being as value fulfillment. She explains what valuing is and what it is to fulfill values over time. In the second half of the book she applies the theory to the problem of how to help others, particularly our friends. We don’t always know how to provide the help we know others need; but we also have the problem of knowing what help they need in the first place, and this is a problem that requires ethical thinking. Tiberius argues that when we want to help others achieve greater well-being, we should pay attention to their values. This entails attending to how others’ values fit together, how they understand what it means to succeed in terms of these values, and how things could change for them over time. Being a good and helpful friend, then, requires cultivating some habits of humility that overcome our tendency to think we know what’s good for other people without really understanding what it’s like to be them.
The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits
Oxford University Press 2008
What can we do to live life wisely? You might think that the answer would be to think and reflect more. But this is not Valerie Tiberius’s answer. On her view, when we really take account of what we are like – when we recognize our psychological limits – we will see that too much thinking and reflecting is bad for us. Instead, we need to think and reflect better. This means that we need to develop wisdom: we need to care about things that will sustain us and give us good experiences, we need to have perspective on our successes and failures, and we need to be moderately self-aware and cautiously optimistic about human nature. Further, we need to know when to think about our values, character, and choices, and when not to. A crucial part of wisdom, Tiberius maintains, is knowing when to stop reflecting and get lost in the experience.
The Reflective Life also considers the issue of how to philosophize about how to live. A recent trend in moral philosophy has been toward what is sometimes called ’empirically informed ethics’. This methodology has not yet caught on in normative ethics, primarily because we cannot conclude anything about what ought to be the case from the facts about what is. Tiberius agrees that this leap should be avoided, but argues that empirical psychology can inform our philosophical theories in interesting ways.
DeYoung, Colin G., and Tiberius, V. (2022). “Value fulfillment from a cybernetic perspective: A new psychological theory of well-being”, Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Value Fulfillment Theory (VFT) is a philosophical theory of well-being. Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T) is a psychological theory of personality. Both start with a conception of the person as a goal-seeking (or value-pursuing) organism, and both take goals and the psychological integration of goals to be key to well-being. By joining VFT and CB5T, we produce a cybernetic value fulfillment theory in which we argue that well-being is best conceived as the fulfillment of psychologically integrated values. Well-being is the effective pursuit of a set of nonconflicting values that are emotionally, motivationally, and cognitively suitable to the person. The primary difference in our theory from other psychological theories of well-being is that it does not provide a list of intrinsic goods, instead emphasizing that each person may have their own list of intrinsic goods. We discuss the implications of our theory for measuring, researching, and improving well-being.
“Does Virtue Make Us Happy?: A new theory for an old problem” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian Miller (eds.), Moral Psychology Volume 5: Virtue and Happiness. A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, 2017, pp. 547-578.
The Well-Being of Philosophy, Presidential Address, Proceedings & Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. Vol. 91, November 2017, pp. 65-86.
Does the New Wave in Moral Psychology Sink Kant? The Blackwell Handbook on Naturalism, Kelly James Clark (ed.). (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), pp. 336-350.
Some claim that recent work in moral psychology both undermines Kantian moral theory and supports Humean approaches to morality. Does moral psychology undermine Kantian, rationalistic moral theory? After distinguishing various Kantian claims and the evidence against them, I argue that the empirical case against Kantianism as a viable moral theory is not conclusive.
“Well-Being Policy: What Standard of Well-Being” with Daniel Haybron, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1(04), 2015, pp. 712-733.
This paper examines the norms that should guide policies aimed at promoting happiness or, more broadly, well-being. In particular, we take up the question of which conception of well-being should govern well-being policy (WBP), assuming some such policies to be legitimate. In answer, we lay out a case for ‘pragmatic subjectivism’: given widely accepted principles of respect for persons, well-being policy may not assume any view of well-being, subjectivist or objectivist. Rather, it should promote what its intended beneficiaries see as good for them: pleasure for hedonists, excellence for Aristotelians, etc. Specifically, well-being policy should promote citizens’ ‘personal welfare values’: those values—and not mere preferences—that individuals see as bearing on their well-being. Finally, we briefly consider how pragmatic subjectivism works in practice. While our discussion takes for granted the legitimacy of well-being policy, we suggest that pragmatic subjectivism strengthens the case for such policy.
Prudential Value Oxford Handbook of Value Theory edited by Iwao Hirose and Jonas Olson. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Well-Being, Values and Improving Lives Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business and Society, Subramanian Rangan (Ed.). Oxford University Press, 2015); pages 339-357.
While large scale crises such as global poverty or climate change require large scale solutions, individual agents – as consumers, activists, voters, and leaders – certainly must play a role. This chapter proposes a theory of individual well-being that affords a strategy for generating reasons to do better by the world that also promote long-term self-interest. The theory defended characterizes well-being in terms of value fulfillment over time, and it holds that a person’s current values might be in need of improvement or modification to count as best for the person over time. After an overview and brief defense of the theory, the chapter turns to the question of how a person’s values might be modified and improved in ways that benefit both the person and the planet.
Recipes for a Good Life: Eudaimonism and the Contribution of Philosophy The Best Within Us: Positive Psychology Perspectives on Eudaimonic Functioning, edited by Alan Waterman. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2013), pp. 19-38.
Philosophical Methods in Happiness Research The Oxford Handbook of Happiness, David, S., Boniwell, I. and Ayers, A (eds.). (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 315-325.
Constructivism and Wise Judgment Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, edited by James Lenman and Yonatan Shemmer, (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 195-212.
In this paper I introduce a version of constructivism that relies on a theory of practical wisdom. Wise judgment constructivism is a type of constructivism because it takes correct judgments about what we have “all-in” reason to do to be the result of a process we can follow, where our interest in the results of this process stems from our practical concerns. To fully defend the theory would require a comprehensive account of wisdom, which is not available. Instead, I describe a constructivist methodology for defending an account of wisdom and outline its main features. This gives us enough to see what wise judgment constructivism would look like, why it might be an attractive theory, and how it is different from other versions of constructivism.
Open-mindedness and Normative Contingency Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 7, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 182-204.
Open-mindedness seems to be a virtue because an open mind is more receptive to the truth. But if value judgments are best understood as a human projection, expression, or construction, then it is unclear why open-mindedness is a virtue when it comes to normative judgments. If moral truths are not “out there”, what is the point of an open mind? What are we being open to? Further, if oughts and values are, in some way, contingent on us, open-mindedness may put us at greater risk of losing important convictions than in the case of belief about the world. In this paper I defend open-mindedness for normative judgment in the context of meta-ethical theories that makes values mind-dependent.
Wisdom Revisited: A Case Study in Normative Theorizing with Jason Swartwood; Philosophical Explorations, Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 277–295.
Extensive discussions of practical wisdom are relatively rare in the philosophical literature these days. This is strange given the theoretical and practical importance of wisdom and, indeed, the etymology of the word “philosophy”. In this paper, we remedy this inattention by proposing a methodology for developing a theory of wisdom and using this methodology to outline a viable theory. The methodology we
favor is a version of wide reflective equilibrium. We begin with psychological research on folk intuitions about wisdom, which helps us to avoid problems caused by reliance on the possibly idiosyncratic intuitions of professional philosophers. The folk theory is then elaborated in light of theoretical desiderata and further empirical
research on human cognitive capacities. The resulting view emphasizes policies that the wise person adopts in order to cope with the many obstacles to making good choices.
Well-being with Alexandra Plakias, in Doris, J., & the Moral Psychology Research Group. (eds.). The Moral Psychology Handbook. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) pp. 401-431.
Normative Theory and Psychological Research with Alicia Hall, The Journal of Positive Psychology, Vol. 5. No. 3, May 2010, pp. 212-225.
This paper is a contribution to the debate about eudaimonism started by Kashdan, Biswas-Diener, King, and Waterman in a previous issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology. We point out that one thing that is missing from this debate is an understanding of the problems with subjective theories of well-being that motivate a turn to objective theories. We then argue that a suitably modified subjective theory can solve these problems and that this is the theory that ought to be favored by psychologists.
Appiah and the Autonomy of Ethics Neuroethics, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2010, pp. 209-214.
Well-Being: Psychological Research for Philosophers Philosophy Compass 1/5, 2006, pp. 493-505.
Value Commitments and the Balanced Life Utilitas, Volume 17, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 24-45.
According to critics such as Bernard Williams, traditional ethical theories render it impossible to lead good and meaningful lives because they emphasize moral duty or the promotion of external values at the expense of the personal commitments that make our lives worth living from our own perspective. Responses to this criticism have not addressed the fundamental question about the proper relationship between a person’s commitments to moral values and her commitments to non-moral or personal values.
In this article, I suggest that we think about this relationship by reflecting on the way that a prudentially virtuous person who has commitments to both moral and non-moral values would regard these commitments. I argue that people with the virtue of balance do have reasons to act in accordance with their moral commitments, but that whether or not these reasons are overriding depends on the type of commitment in question.
Cultural Differences and Philosophical Accounts of Well-Being The Journal of Happiness Studies, 5, 2004, pp. 293-314.
Maintaining Conviction and the Humean Account of Normativity Topoi, Volume 21, Nos. 1-2, 2002, pp. 165-173.
Humean Heroism: Value Commitments and the Source of Normativity Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 81, No. 4, December 2000, pp. 426-446.
This paper is a contribution to the debate about eudaimonism started by Kashdan, Biswas-Diener, King, and Waterman in a previous issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology. We point out that one thing that is missing from this debate is an understanding of the problems with subjective theories of well-being that motivate a turn to objective theories. We then argue that a suitably modified subjective theory can solve these problems and that this is the theory that ought to be favored by psychologists.